


EXILE / RETURN

by zambla



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1980s, 1990s, Activism, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Art, Character Death, Diary, Drug Use, HIV/AIDS, Homophobia, Illnesses, London, M/M, Wales, artist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-01-26 23:55:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12569040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/zambla
Summary: Sirius makes a road trip down to the Gower peninsula. Non-magic AU. 1980s-1990s.





	EXILE / RETURN

Are the slumbering valleys  
                   him in slumber  
                   are the still undulations  
the still limbs of him sleeping?  
Is the configuration of the land  
                   the furrowed body of the lord  
are the scarred ridges  
                   his dented greaves  
do the trickling gullies  
                   yet drain his hog-wounds?  
Does the land wait the sleeping lord  
                or is the wasted land  
that very lord who sleeps?  
  
—David Jones, “The Sleeping Lord”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
1.  
  
“I’ve started a journal,” Remus had said. “With that notebook you got in Berlin. The one you said I could have—”  
  
It had been two seeks since his hospital visit. It had not gone well. They had just cleared away dinner, and Remus seemed strange, almost buoyed and focused with a feyness in him. He was toying with a coin in his fingers.  
  
“I’ve started writing and it’s been almost impossible to stop—though I’m not sure who it’s for, me or—someone else.”  
  
“What—what would you do with it?”  
  
“I think I want you to have it, in the end.”  
  
—  
  
The notebook itself is not remarkable. Sirius had bought it on a whim in the reception area of the Käthe Kollwitz Museum. Half-sized, and unruled. Case bound in black. Inside Remus’s hand is clean and even, quite beautiful, though in the later entries the penmanship start to fall in quality. Some  _i_  or  _j_  would lose a tittle or the ponderous  _t_  suffer a poor cross—but the  _Q_  Remus always wrote as if he were imitating the Doves Type, a long elegant tail with the lushest of an upswing:  _Queer_ , written with such an exuberance and life when Sirius first saw it written he could not help from crying.  
  
Sirius lies supine in the the little hotel room. The false leather cover is smooth and the weight of it a comfort as he starts his read again.  
  
The entries are surprisingly free of edits, and the words fluid, as if Remus had thought these long before setting them down—they had been worn smooth and round and forgiving. Remus only wrote on the recto leaf—the verso he kept clean because the heavy ink Remus favored bled through the cheap paper. In these back pages you can feels the impress of the pen, fine intaglio, undulating as if rivers flowing with the knowledge of ages and tectonics and disasters, spreading out or thinning in.  
  
  
  
  
  
[ _December 7, 1992_ ]  
  
I think I remember the color of steel—Owen, the next door’s lad—I remember that his dad had fingers the color of steel. Bluish, maybe. He worked at the steelworks, da had told me. A cicatricial color. When he picked up Owen you’d see his whole hand under the small armpits, flat and rough.  
  
In Aberavon the steelworks churned every single day of my life—a taste of steel was in the sky, which I had assumed was what air tasted like until I knew otherwise. And rust, coruscating rust. Rust bleeding in rivulets as if steel could be wounded.  
  
It all bleeds together—time. In school you could demarcate it, dam it into sections, though now I can hardly connect year and deed—in grammar school when Billy had pushed me into a ditch and ma had to get my lip stitched up—in sixth form when they made me under prefect—the long walks from the piano teacher’s house (what was her name again?)—avoiding being picked out at rugby. The shadow of sex and queerness like scarlet posts through it all—sneaking out Wilde from the library so I wouldn’t be seen checking them out, Wilde and  _Brideshead Revisited_ , and Forster—and later came Genet, and Rimbaud, and Cocteau—being called queer softly or loudly, behind my back or to my face. Trying to stay silent in my room wanking when ma was watching the telly next door, how old was I—fifteen—younger? Who was I think of then, Tommy the year above? The cover of some magazine? The shame of it—the masses and confessions and the insidious church—shame, like a pall. All of it now seems the rusted taste of someone else’s life.  
  
  
  
[ _December 8, 1992_ ]  
  
I wonder if I could paint it now—the row of terrace homes where I have walked up and down, alone, in afternoon schoolboy rituals, through their corrugated and conjoined roofs where sometimes a neighbor would poke their head out the window and shout in greeting or censure. The air was bad at dusk—and my asthma at its worst. Down by the beach, where the sunset curdled beneath the opprobrious humps of steelworks factories, where smoke and steam wavered into the sky.  
  
As a lad I always marveled at the plumes—eternally rising above sea and sun like oracular fires—though in my mind it merged with a documentary I saw on Channel One, a documentary on the War, where at the death camp footages they cut them with those of gray Polish skies, smoke rising—and the first time I saw it I confused it with a memory—the holocaust.  
  
Ma’s mother was a Jew. This she did not so much tell me as I had to infer, from the way she talked about her mother. Her mother came down to Swansea and married a Welshman—that must have been an ordeal. A breach in kind—what they used to call miscegenation, though she might have converted to Anglicanism. Not that I would have been spared even without the Jewish mark.  
  
I must have painted these plumes in one formalism or another—over and over, trying to deconstruct them, distill them, to somehow reverse their combustion. What is the power of painting but to reverse time? But now—so many years later, with my diagnosis, I think perhaps for the first time I do not resent time. I feel as if I know what I should be doing.  
  
  
  
  
  
2.  
  
“It’s  _them_. Not just the government. I fucking hate all of them, all of the fucking heterosoc. And I can’t bloody stand that you have to fucking simper at them over and over again to make them money when they care fuck all about us. You said so yourself—they’re bloody killing you. Because they think we are criminals. They are killing you just as well as the fucking virus.”  
  
“Look, I need to sell my paintings and this is one of the things I have to do—”  
  
They were arguing about whether Remus would go to a function—one of those things where collectors and buyers gathered in the dutifully lit gallery to trade gossip and ponder on fluctuations of the art market. Now that he was dying they were finally buying his work—a little of it, his earlier stuff—nothing too political, it was plain enough. Ever since his diagnosis Remus started a series of drawings, all titled  _Blood_ , done in watercolor and dilutions of his own blood, dried like flakes on the smooth ivory paper. Not a single buyer wanted them while Remus was alive. His gallery didn’t even mention his HIV status in his biographies—though it was public knowledge by then and Remus had insisted— _we just thought perhaps you’d like the privacy_.  
  
“You don’t bloody well have to do anything.”  
  
“I need the money.”  
  
“I can get some from my family.”  
  
“I know you don’t want to do that.”  
  
Sirius vividly remembers coming very close to calling Remus a saint—and recalling it still makes Sirius’s insides tremble with shame.  
  
“Sirius. I just can’t—” Remus continued, his voice hovering like a shard. “I spend days, months, being so angry, so blindly angry. But I can’t stay inside my anger. I can’t live there. I’d rather they remember that we had love—real love—and the rest of it—I don’t know if it matters. I don’t know if I’m a traitor for thinking that.”  
  
When Remus was still healthy enough, they were activists out of necessity—as activists inevitably are. They protested the NHS’s series of moral panic HIV campaigns outside its offices; they laid their bodies outside Scotland Yard when pubs were raided; they staged kiss-ins in bars; they planned the storming of Diana’s speech when she sprouted the same mawkish drivel as the next Tory MP; they laid siege against Jean Marie Le Pen whenever he spoke in London. And yet it was not the first time, but perhaps the most intimate—when Sirius realized that within Remus there was not a sea of anger like there was in himself but a gradient of gentleness, a swath so broad and so steadfast Sirius wondered if it had any end to it.  
  
At some point Sirius took to cataloging Remus’s body—as a necessity, an urgency. The state of his skin to the state of his guts. Towards the end, Remus did not look like Remus, and Sirius did not want to look upon him. The body became not a house but a prison, and as Remus lost his faculties one by one Sirius one by one replaced them with his labor. Towards the end, Sirius would sometimes let his thoughts venture towards unmentionable cliffs and drive through those barricades he had erected. He couldn’t explain afterwards what he had meant to do by these rehearsals of betrayal—and he knew within himself there was instead a cruelty, leashed and submerged though sometimes it lurched unbidden into the surface.  
  
At the petrol station he buys a pack of Silk Cut and a Coca Cola. He started smoking again after Remus died. Sirius wonders, filling up the car, what it’d feel like when he fucked someone else again.  
  
  
  
[ _January 10, 1993_ ]  
  
Sirius, I think of you reading this, and you are never far from my mind. Sometimes I feel that you are within me as if we are the same warp and weft and yet sometimes I feel as though I do not know you at all. But to go on I have to pretend that you are not here, that the future is still the future, that the darkness could be parted, that we walk through the waters.  
  
  
  
[ _January 13, 1993_ ]  
  
David Jones, in his vast mysticism, thought of the Devonian tracts of fossilized fish buried in the anticlines of the Usk the portents of Christ’s ascension—that the living fish and the dead fish are by their essence, sanctifiers of ocean and land, earth, and people. What would he have thought of me, a veritable deserter of land and country, dreaming of London or New York and living in revulsion of Wales? A homosexual, who they say is alienated from the love of Christ, who cannot bear the Judgment, who hides from the grace of land—to whom copper and slate sometimes seem like the twin curses of a backwards people; a wandering Jew, so alike Barabbas himself?  
  
In the beginning it was copper that built Wales—malachite out of Great Orme dug up in such quantities you’d never think of it now, looking at its resorts and summer houses, that there might have been a great and ancient civilization here. They traded the copper all along the Atlantic coast. They grew so rich—rich enough to bury vast caches of gold with their dead, gold traded out of the Middle East—daggers, rings, trinkets, a  _repouseé_  cerement in the British Museum so fine and astonishing I could never forget its meandering luster.  
  
But where are they now, these traders of bronze? Swansea copper wired all of Britain yet the mountains of North Wales did not get electricity until 1980—last of all of the kingdoms. Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent. The virus ravages daily. They want more paintings even though I can’t steady my hands. The System promises you a future—but builds it out of your present. Steel for them and for you: the plumes and rust.  
  
  
  
  
  
3.  
  
Up the coast of Gower on a fair day you could see the Devonian outcrops of the coastline in shifting the mist, their scoria and amalga woven and laminated as if a sacred text. The fishermen had names for them, these enormous shoulders that slumped into the sea. Welsh names Sirius would hear Remus say but would slip out of his memory for their fluidity, for their largeness.  
  
Driving down M4 along the coast Sirius wonders if he knew Remus at all, with the landscape sliding across his mind like an unending zoetrope, if Remus had lived all these crags, these valleys whose shadows had tormented him with both fury and longing.  
  
  
  
  
  
[ _February 21, 1993_ ]  
  
Sirius how I have loved you watching you scrape the Marmite jar in the morning, the curl of your fingers inside the glass neck and kneeling by you how I have loved you, your thighs, your cock, your throat, your hands. How I have loved you in the void between waking and dreaming, how I have loved you between the small kitchen counter and the vast space where their malice lurked, lashed, and lurked again, for what do I care, what can they do beyond what their apathy has already done?  
  
  
  
  
  
4.  
  
The first time Sirius met Remus it was in the summer of 1981 at a club in Mile End called The Store Room where Sirius would habitually get pissed or maybe score a hit of ecstasy when he could scrape together 30 pounds. It was the easy days before the virus—before they knew about it anyway. He found Remus dancing by the speaker stacks one night. The DJ spinning was a particularly talented boy from Manchester who Sirius had introduced a variety of iniquities to—and Remus was dancing as if he feel the music melting in his bones. He barely noticed when Sirius sidled up to him, shouting something filthy in his ear against the lush bassline that swallowed both of them. Remus had just smiled. Circling his arm around Sirius’s neck and closing his eyes, they danced as if they were the only ones dancing. It ended with an unsatisfying blowjob in the bathroom followed by Sirius succumbing to nausea.  
  
The rest Sirius still remembers. He took Remus back to his flat—a dingy, small closet of a place on Charring Cross. The night was warm and close but it felt so new. The morning after Remus told him that he was high as a kite on 2C-B—one of the handful of times he dabbled in psychedelics. That he actually hated dancing otherwise.  
  
When Remus first moved to London he had nothing but a handbag and the address of a man named Benjie he’d met at a school party who’d let Remus sleep on his couch in exchange for small favors. Remus soon moved into a small studio space he rented with his dole money, a small room carved out of a decommissioned clothing warehouse. It was full of paint and turpentine and canvasses stacked on top of another. Remus slept on a mattress on the floor in a corner and pissed in a barely maintained shared bathroom down the hall. He moved in with Sirius at the first mention, because the paint and the thinners aggravated his asthma.  
  
And soon they were furiously in love.  
  
But fate fucks with you. In the winter of 1981 news of the virus, first noticed in Los Angeles, spread throughout London. They started to noticed it amongst their friends, who one by one contracted incurable pneumonia or strange infections. They’d slept with other people: Remus sporadically and Sirius much more prodigiously—and to this day Sirius cannot understand why his test was negative whereas Remus’s positive, and between them their twin fates spanned outward, and Sirius often wonders, like the ache of a familiar wound, the infernal question of whether he would have traded his life for Remus’s—the question not so much as a torment as a constant baseline, a frame.  
  
  
  
  
  
[ _March 1, 1993_ ]  
  
I used to believe in the idea that depicting pain had some use, some power. I used to believe pain is the opposite of pleasure. But love and sex and life has taught me otherwise, and perhaps it is cruelty that is the opposite of pleasure. I wonder about this: That maybe when you depict pain you are instead depicting cruelty; in the logic of photography the lens is the emanation of cruelty—in the logic of painting, the painter’s hand. Heterosoc loves not pleasure but pain, and actually it doesn’t even love pain, it just loves cruelty. It exalts the creation of pain, which it calls strength.  
  
  
  
  
  
4.  
  
In the end Sirius had brought to the hospital room all of Remus’s favorite records. One of the ones Remus wanted to hear repeatedly was  _Last Recording_. Sirius would sit with Remus and read whatever he wanted to hear—the sonnets, Auden, the chapters of  _Maurice_  where happiness reigned—with Holiday’s graveled, porous voice drifting in the background, asking them if her magic could erase time—could resurrect human life.  
  
The autumn was still early—just a hint of it in the rims of the elm leaves on Manchester Street. Remus had been so sick he didn’t have the strength to do anything. He talked as if to himself, without caesurae or breath, without any reference to the prodigious exterior world.  
  
“I’m glad I’m dying with you,” Remus had joked. “I’d ask you to take all of me but there’s not much left.”  
  
In the end, they wore latex gloves. They mandated cremation. Barriers, walls—a skin for the monster. Plastic is such a poor cerement, without color or meaning, without feeling or humanness or texture. The blackness of it.  
  
Sirius secretly planned to smash all the windows of the clinic in an act of black revenge—and yet contemplating the rage that buoyed like pond scum inside his grief, he simply signed all the papers in place of Remus’s absent next-of-kin.  
  
In the boot of his car, wrapped in a silk scarf they had gotten from the streets of Galata in Istanbul, the urn.  
  
  
  
  
  
[ _March 10, 1993_ ]  
  
I keep dreaming about Wales—the places I had visited as a child.  
  
A summer trip down to Laugharne and Dylan Thomas’s writing shed. Herons in the estuary. Valleys and hills of Gwynedd receding in the back window of the old family Reliant. Stories of the miracles of Saint David’s water. Welsh words which da could read but neither ma nor I—long and slender words. Then there was that week—when I went back for da’s funeral—when I drove down to the Worm’s Head in the rental. It seemed to swallow me, the land, the sea, the tide, the sun.  
  
I used to joke when we got back from the Aegean that perhaps we should move to Wales—get a cabin up in the mountains, or go north to Portmeirion and pretend we were Bertrand Russell or Wittgenstein or Number Six. But in truth I could not picture Sirius there, or us. In Wales, outside the luminary powers of London, trudging through the quarry where mud came up to your shins, struggling for meaning among the mountain. It seemed our love had no power there.  
  
The land, the land. Rain in the cavern. Sun on the deep.  
  
In Wales there is a green that has no name; it lives in my heart. In Wales there is a heart that has no man; it lives in a beast. In Wales there is a pain. It has no origin and no wound; it has no boundary and no stem.  
  
I sat around the house today doing fuck all. Painted a little. Started a small portrait of Sirius amalgamated from photos—  
  
Eno: Another Green World  
  
  
  
  
  
5.  
  
Right afterwards—for nearly a year, in fact—Remus’s journal Sirius hardly opened. He could not bear to touch it. Its finiteness terrified him—for fear of reaching its end. Fear of the virus. Fear of the inevitable. Fear of the pace of the blank pages where the infernal silence reigned. He wondered when Remus had finally stopped writing altogether; though he still tried to paint his paintings were filled with the tremors which wracked him. Maybe the whole final year was missing from these pages. He feared that silence more than the silence of death, the silence of absence.  
  
  
  
  
  
[ _March 14, 1993_ ]  
  
I keep dreaming of my old house. Ma’s house. The top drawer in the washing room where she kept my spare asthma medicine—and the bottom drawer where she kept a stash of gin hidden behind her menstrual pads. I wonder how much she liked or disliked her life, and how much she drank.  
  
It’s funny how you grow up in a house, and sometimes you stand in someone else’s house but you stare into the old one—the one you used to remember. You remember not the curtains but the picture of the curtains under a certain light. A photograph of the windowsill. The walls when you were five, yellow with weather.  
  
In my childhood house the plaster was damp and cold. There was mold in the edges of my vision that I had always sensed should not have been there—and ma treated it as a moral failing of hers, that the house was in decay, that so much could be lost, that her small charms could not even be wielded over the ever-declining domicile, that she was powerless after all.  
  
Houses could hide you, like a skin for your life.  
  
Inside it you could be flesh. Outside it you were something else—a monster, a virus, a jewel.  
  
  
  
[ _April 3, 1993_ ]  
  
I sometimes fear that my memory itself is a simulacrum. That it creates anew—all this time I carried within me a new house, new parents, new faces, each time I remembered them I create them  _de novo_. Each time my lover is a new person. That memory is not the dusty industry of Le Carré’s filing cabinets and archival photographs, but what Goya thought, what Poe thought—a vestige of the nightmarish faculty, a painter with an infinitely tender brush, carrying one frail moment into another like a deluded god. I walk into my old house, I overcome space and time, I overcome my own immense present, and I begin to weep—because is there anywhere that time has no power, is there anywhere else?  
  
  
  
[ _April 21, 1993_ ]  
  
Caratacus, resplendent rebel, the first be-worded Welshman, lost at last, kneeling bound and bloodied in Rome after the Triumphal procession—after his words on finality, his reminder that glory and defeat are entwined, what happened to him? After his speech moved the Roman citizenry, the Pretorians, Claudius, after his hands were unshackled in the Imperial halls and he stumbled out astonished and clattering into the Agora, what happened to Caratacus, what happened to Wales? Did Caratacus flee into the Roman countryside, never to speak again? Did he starve in the street like a slave? Did he trek out westwards, seeking the ancestral language of the Atlantic? Is Wales lost like his fate, its soul no archeology can reconstruct?  
  
His death was not worth recording to the Romans, in the high tongue of their office—yet the Welsh are so named for speaking Latin. So then perhaps Caratacus had lived, had slipped through the viatic gates of history, through time, and he had never died. He has lived in all the interregna, at the periphery of all the empires, unscathed.  
  
How long have the Welsh thought that their salvation lies in the land—in the sealands, the bluffs, the caves? How long have we rested our faith in it, because the people lie exhausted?  
  
  
  
  
  
6.  
  
At some point after Remus’s diagnosis they both decided to travel. Sirius took the last of the money left to him from his uncle and they went all around the Greek islands. They spent two whole seasons in Corfu where the rent was dirt cheap, the company varied and delightful, and the food unendingly delicious. But the sunny Aegean could not hold them for long. Remus found he could not paint in Greece while the amiability of their days grated on him, and after a while, he did not much like the sun either.  
  
  
  
  
  
[ _May 23, 1993_ ]  
  
As a teenage I had always wondered how John Cale, a boy out of Garnant, sixteen, managed to land himself in London then New York on the wild force of his viola—and feverishly had I hoped to discover this secret, alone and sixteen also, using the last of my weekly monies going up to Swansea to buy vinyls from Killer Records.  
  
I remember poring over those early albums, not just from the Velvets but what I could piece together from music rags or art books, clues of the enigmatic world of the American avant-garde; of Le Monte Young, Terry Riley, Cage, elusive names then as a lad I had never seen or heard outside brief glimpses, those distant pulsars of another world. A cultural program on BBC 1—a paragraph in some book on music in the Swansea Library—bootlegged tapes fished out from bins marked ‘Misc.’ or ‘Other’ that now I can only conjecture were corrupted excerpts from _A Rainbow in Curved Air_.  
  
Are these the stones from which I constructed the private empire, hermetic and inviolate?  
  
I keep coming back to them. The Velvets’ first album I had at some point and lost, but it didn’t matter. I think it had already long lived in my mind, all the riffraff din of the electric viola. I have involuntarily memorized it all through willful and banal repetition, so much that I can simultaneously reconstruct with perfect fidelity the chromatic overtones of the strangely tuned guitars and the percussive, discursive bass. All the manic sustain which lived beyond their sonic presence as if driven by a curse. Listening to it now, you knew, in the end, that the mania was really Cale’s—because he took it with him, that apparition of pain. Cale took it with him when he left, and whatever heinous and ecstatic revelation it held I never have figured out.  
  
  
  
[ _July 7, 1993_ ]  
  
The doctor at St. Mary’s had told me that my lungs are infected. Secondary pulmonary complications. I am to take a course of three types of antibiotics—and then another round of interferons—last week I panicked while realizing that the drugs are taking away my vision.  
  
The National Health Service was the dream of a Welsh socialist, Nye Bevan, a coal miner since twelve. The welfare state dismantled the Poor Laws. It is hard to remember someone fought for all these things, and it could be easily lost. The miner’s strike showed that clear as day, despite all the marching and organizing we did. Not that Labour is any kinder to queers than the Tories.  
  
I used to think that only kings could exile you—kings and wars. But there are those who don’t return who prove me wrong. Is  _where_  the where that they live? Is  _where_  where that memory lies sick? Is  _where_  the veil they wear? Where is Wales now, where is the slate? Where now are bronze slag for spear tips and copper sheets for wires mined out of Swansea? Are they also Wales, all the slate backbone of England Wales? Where does a country end, and another begin? Where are the herons careening like ghosts of the past?  
  
No—no country, no land, no people. The queer have never lived anywhere, and now we are all dying. We will not be saved—not by the heterosoc who will sit by in complacent horror while we die. We had prayed—had we prayed?—we had screamed, and yet I imagine them all, leaving before me, dying in the noonday and midnight and dawntimes—and then what? What if they crossed the mountain to another world? I contemplate my obituary.  
  
  
  
  
  
7.  
  
The last entry is unique, unlike those that precede it. They are not in the shaky and uncertain penmanship of Remus’s later entries—when he barely had the strength for facing each day—but neither were they written with the fluid grace and wildness of his later thoughts. This was written as if it was composed elsewhere—purposefully, solidly, transferred herein without a single mistake. The hand is crisp and fair.  
  
  
  
  
[ _June 14, 1993_ ]  
  
I dream now as if under the sea. I dreamed that there is a way to remember the forgotten. I dreamed that love is real. I dream that we are uniting. I dream that they return, from blue fields, bearing cotton flowers which grow wherever it is that gay men go to when they die. I dream that they return from their fast slumber in the halls of silent time.  
  
O Sirius, my homeland, my fire, my love, my comrades who lie dead in the NHS, my comrades who died abandoned, my comrades who died in love, my love, my love, my comrades of this earth. Will I see you again, in the tender sun, in the high hills, when the night herons that gather by sylvan Wye have scattered into morning, when the west wind shifts into nothing? Will I see you again, in your eminence, in your glory, in the panoply of your wild wonders? Will I see you again, your courage burnished, your carapace torn, standing proud and lovely in the open gates of time? Will I see you again, with the virus erased, with mortality forgotten, on the slate steps worn smooth with rain, on the pinnacles of suns that have yet to rise, will I see you again, restored?  
  
  
  
  
  
8.  
  
The tape skids, at last, to a final slip at the end of “Twoism”, like a semicolon. The last phrase is elided rather comically, flattened and filthy between two floating notes. The car is already stopped. The song haunts the moments thereafter with its heartbeat.  
  
The road ends here. He walks from the carpark down to the headlands, three miles from Rhossili to the downland, through the heathered earth where solifluction had created lobes of uneven ground. Over the crest of the Downs you could see it—the golden strands of Rhossili Bay and the level jut of Worm’s Head peering westward like a lazy hand.  
  
Legends say there is used to be a house there, on the empty Worm’s Head. A hutch where the fairies lived—and if you came to the beach at dusk you could make out a faint glow flickering in the fog. But you can’t get to it once night sets in—the land bridge vanishes soon after twilight; the island sink into the sea. Shipmen lose themselves trying to find it in the darkness, hearing a whistling in the air as if a flute was calling them. They say if you can find it in the spring tide moonlight you’d be given the thing that you truly want. Wealth. Love. Youth. When the morning comes their bodies wash ashore.  
  
On the ruined rib of Devil’s Bridge Sirius stands barefoot with his tennis shoes tucked into the back pockets of his jeans. He scatters a pinch of the ashes, as if a magic giver granting covenant. No one else is about in the noonday sun.  
  
The sea crashes like a maw.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Derek Jarman’s journals are the inspiration for much of this fic—as well as his 1993 film Blue, which is an eternal inspiration for how much power words and voice can have. “Heterosoc” is the term Jarman used to encompass the homophobic patriarchy. Details of Jarman’s gay activism work came from an interview in The Quietus with Peter Tatchell and a history of the London activist group OutRage! [[1](http://outrage.org.uk/1999/02/outrage-an-oral-history/)] [[2](http://thequietus.com/articles/14622-peter-tatchell-derek-jarman-interview)]
> 
> 2\. Thanks to Charlotte who suggested that I read David Jones, whose mystical interpretation of the geology of Wales, of Welsh history and culture, was fascinating.
> 
> 3\. The last diary entry is inspired by the libretto to a sound installation / opera called [_The Ears Between Worlds are Always Speaking_](http://postcommodity.com/TheEarsBetweenWorlds.html) by the artist collective postcommodity
> 
> 4\. My conception of Aberavon is based on some journalism pieces that arose from the recent threat of closure that its Steelworks complex has faced, chiefly this photographic series by the [_Baltimore Sun_](http://darkroom.baltimoresun.com/2016/03/15000-jobs-at-risk-as-steel-making-company-plans-to-sell-entire-uk-business/).
> 
> 5\. Lastly, the fictional East London club called The Store House is the tiniest of a reference to The Warehouse, the black gay club in Chicago where House music started. And in my anachronistic mind, Mr Fingers’ “[Can You Feel It](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeiH9Mm0E5Y)” is what Remus and Sirius were dancing to when they first met.


End file.
